John Lott's Website

1/12/2013

Montpelier, Ohio to let janitors carry concealed handguns in schools

This program actually makes a lot more sense than armed uniformed guards. The janitors will obviously be in school anyway. The problem that I have with the proposal is that they shouldn't announce publicly who is going to be armed.

“I don't have a problem with it. With all the shootings going on in these little schools this will make me feel more at peace,” said Mrs. Hickman as she waited Friday in her minivan for her two sons and daughter to be dismissed.

Montpelier schools may be the first in Ohio to ramp up security by authorizing employees to carry weapons.

The district has about 1,000 students in kindergarten through 12th grade and 75 teachers in one building in this Williams County village of 4,000. . . .

1/11/2013

So does this law pass the reasonable basis test? The Supreme Court has struck down many laws based on the claim that there is no rational basis for the law. So does a 45 year ban on gun ownership for someone who probably would never have pleaded to the misdemeanor if he had known what the law was going to be changed to decades later pass the rational basis test?

A three-judge panel in Washington upheld a lower-court ruling “which found ‘no constitutional impediment’ to including common-law misdemeanants” within the federal firearms ban. The lower court observed that “the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited,” U.S. Circuit Judge David Tatel wrote in today’s opinion.
The federal ban applies to several categories of people including those who are mentally ill or who have been convicted of felonies or certain kinds of misdemeanors. . . .
Jefferson Wayne Schrader, of Cleveland, Georgia, sued to challenge the ban in 2010 after a companion tried to buy him a shotgun and Schrader tried to purchase a handgun in two separate transactions.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation blocked the shotgun purchase when the National Instant Criminal Background Check computer system flagged Schrader’s July 1968 conviction for misdemeanor assault. When informed of the rejection, Schrader canceled his handgun order.The assault occurred while Schrader, then 20, was serving in the Navy and encountered a member of a street gang who had previously assaulted him, according to his complaint.Schrader punched his assailant and was convicted of common- law assault and battery and fined $100. The court imposed no jail time. Schrader went on to serve a tour of duty in Vietnam and had no other brushes with the law, except for one traffic violation, he said in his complaint. . . .

Here is the cost of background checks. Of course, false positives also stop people from getting quickly that they need for self protection.

Ben Swann on Piers Morgan’s homicide statistics

This is a well done take and it uses similar information to what I have used previously (see for example here).
Two notes:
1) The Small Arms Survey data that he refers to that purportedly measures gun ownership rates is highly dubious. The organization that put them together is a gun control organization and they want to make it look like there is more murder in high gun ownership countries.
2) I need to point out that my work has tried to argue that cross-sectional analysis is rarely very useful (MGLC, chp. 2 and The Bias Against Guns, chp. 5). Still that is something that most people do.

Question: If someone is so dangerous that they should have a lifetime ban on gun ownership, why should we even let them out of the mental facility? Criminals and others who shouldn't have guns get them all the time. If they are really that dangerous, why take the risk?

WOWT-TV reports that nearly 300 employees at 11 Wendy’s locations in the Omaha area will have their hours reduced to 28 hours a week because the franchise owner says he can’t afford to pay his employees health care.

“It has a huge effect on me and pretty much everybody that I work with,” employee T.J. Growbeck told the station. “I’m hoping that I can get some sort of promotion because then I would get my hours, but everybody is shooting for that because of the hours being cut.” . . . .

No, but you can need that many bullets for self-defense. The problem is that once a gun can take a magazine, it can take a magazine of any size. Magazines are simple metal boxes with a spring in them and they are very easy to make and they soon may become even easier. Might as well ban all semi-automatic guns that accept magazines. Problem is that would limit people's ability to defend themselves.Jacob Sullum has a nice discussion here.

Female clerk uses gun to stop robbery

The Foundations that brought you Obamacare are banding together to bring you Gun Control

The resources for these organizations will swamp those of the NRA. The studies that they fund and the ads that they finance will also be much more openly received by the media. Bringing these foundations together may be the biggest advance towards gun control in my lifetime. Imagine the resourcees of 50 Joyce Foundations.

“After countless hours on the phone with Bank of America, I finally got a manager in the right department that told me the reason that the deposits were on hold for further review -- her exact words were -- ‘We believe you should not be selling guns and parts on the Internet.’”(emphasis added)

Sirochman also wrote that he told the bank manager that “they have no right to make up their own new rules and regs” and that “[American Spirit is a] firearms manufacturer with all the proper licensing.”

He also noted that he has been doing business with Bank of America for over 10 years, but will now be looking for a new bank.

According to Unlawful News, this isn't the first time Bank of America has targeted a customer involved in the firearms industry. . . . .

Responding to Piers Morgan's interview with Alex Jones

After Piers Morgan contacted Dylan Byers over at Politico today about his interview with Alex Jones, I just could not resist also emailing Byers. Here is what Byers reported on my exchange with him. For Piers discussion with Byers see:

Unlike printing guns, which doesn't work, printing ammunition magazines doesn't face any practical problems. Of course, people could always make the magazines using simple tools in any machine shop (after all they are just metal boxes with a spring), but my guess is that these 3D printers will capture attention in a way that the old machine shops didn't. This article is from Metro News:

As Peter K, the person who sent me the link to this information, noted these printing machines are everywhere: "my brother in law owns a couple of these type of machines for his jewelry business. you can make just about anything with them."

Note that it is somewhat misleading to speak of a US homicide rate as 3 percent of the counties in the US account for over 70 percent of the murders (they have about 23 percent of the population).Much is made of comparing some rather arbitrarily defined "civilized" nations, but what can Americans learn from these nations? If the non-US developed nations show anything, even with the extremely questionable data that Charles Blow at the New York Times apparently trusts regarding gun ownership rates, it shows that higher gun ownership means lower homicide or no change in gun homicide rates. He just hadn’t even bothered to graph out the numbers.

There is a real problem in using cross-sectional data. Below is part of a long discussion in The Bias Against Guns, Chp. 5 (More Guns, Less Crime also has a long discussion in Chp. 2). Take a simple example. Suppose for the sake of argument that high-crime countries are the ones that most frequently adopt the most stringent gun control laws. What if gun control actually lowered crime, but not by enough to reduce rates to the same low levels prevailing in the majority of countries that did not adopt the laws. Looking across countries, it would then falsely appear that stricter gun control resulted in higher crime. Economists refer to this as an “endogeniety” problem. The adoption of the policy is a reaction to other events (that is, “endogenous”), in this case crime. To resolve this, one must examine how the high-crime areas that chose to adopt the controls changed over time —not only relative to their own past levels but also relative to areas that did not institute such controls.

Unfortunately, many contemporary discussions rely on misinterpretations of cross-sectional data. The New York Times recently conducted a cross-sectional study of murder rates in states with and without the death penalty, and found that “Indeed, 10 of the 12 states without capital punishment have homicide rates below the national average, Federal Bureau of Investigation data shows, while half the states with the death penalty have homicide rates above the national average” (Raymond Bonner and Ford Fessenden, “States With No Death Penalty Share Lower Homicide Rates,” New York Times, September 22, 2000, p. A1.). However, they erroneously concluded that the death penalty did not deter murder. The problem is that the states without the death penalty (Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Rhode Island, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Vermont) have long enjoyed relatively low murder rates, something that might well have more to do with other factors than the death penalty. Instead one must compare, over time, how murder rates change in the two groups – those adopting the death penalty and those that did not.

Of course, I have other problems with the New York Times discussion. For example, the rates of gun ownership for Switzerland and Israel are ridiculously low. This survey excludes all the military weapons kept in Swiss homes in 2007 because they were technically owned by the government. Israeli guns are also excluded for the same reason. But if people have possession of guns in their homes for decades, the issue should be that public possession, not who technically owned the guns. My point above was that even if those numbers are taken as given, you still find the opposite relationship from what the New York Times was claiming. Of course, if you fix them, you will get a negative relationship across all developed countries even with the US observation included. The reason that the Small Arms Survey messes up those two entries is that Israel and Switzerland are very low murder rate countries and giving them their true values would pull down the regression line a lot. Putting the US all by itself out there at 88 firearms per 100 people drives the supposed positive relationship claimed for developed countries (see below).

The graph showing all non-US countries is shown here.

So what if we asked a different question? Including the US in the data shows the absurdity of the Small Arms Survey measure of gun ownership in 2007. They define it in such a way to exclude the military weapons in Swiss homes and to exclude most Israeli guns because the government technically owns them. The Small Arms Survey claims that there are only 7 guns per 100 people in Israel, when up to 15 percent of the adult Jewish Israeli population has been able to openly carry handguns. Virtually all guns in Israel are technically owned by the government, but Israelis may have possession of a gun for decades. It seems that possession of the gun and not technical ownership is what is the real question here. Switching either or both of these countries so that they had a higher gun ownership rate than the US would offset their bias for the US rate. In any case, despite my objections to both cross-sectional data and the obviously bogus Small Arms Survey measure of gun ownership, here are the results with the US included. Doing this leaves the result for the world essentially unchanged and makes the relationship for OECD countries equal zero.

1/07/2013

Obama tired of hearing about cutting spending

Remember the numbers about how health insurance premiums for many individuals are soaring under Obamacare? Or Obama's promises to cut "net government spending"? Well, how is that working out for you Mr. President? From the WSJ:

Senator Ted Cruz on gun control and other issues

Remember Obama's promise to make health insurance more affordable? Addressing Congress on September 9, 2009, President Obama said, “The plan I’m announcing tonight would meet three basic goals. It will provide more security and stability to those who have health insurance. It will provide insurance to those who don’t. And it will slow the growth of health care costs for our families, our businesses, and our government.”Now this in the New York Times:

Particularly vulnerable to the high rates are small businesses and people who do not have employer-provided insurance and must buy it on their own.

In California, Aetna is proposing rate increases of as much as 22 percent, Anthem Blue Cross 26 percent and Blue Shield of California 20 percent for some of those policy holders, according to the insurers’ filings with the state for 2013. These rate requests are all the more striking after a 39 percent rise sought by Anthem Blue Cross in 2010 helped give impetus to the law, known as the Affordable Care Act, which was passed the same year and will not be fully in effect until 2014.

In other states, like Florida and Ohio, insurers have been able to raise rates by at least 20 percent for some policy holders. The rate increases can amount to several hundred dollars a month. . . .

A promise that will be impossible to fulfill: Gun control bill passed this month

Despite the promise to pass gun regulations this month, that would be difficult anyway, but with immigration and the debt ceiling, it seems impossible. So why does the Obama administration keep making these promises? Add to this Obama's promise that the gun control bill will be comprehensive. Still, Obama has said that he is willing to spend all his capital on this and it is possible that bad gun control legislation could get through. Republicans have just a narrow majority in the House and Democrats have control of the Senate. It might not go as quickly as Biden promises, but there is still a risk it could get passed.

In an interview with the Boston Herald, Mayor Thomas Menino said that the Obama administration is going to “get it done.”

“(Biden) said, ‘Tommy, I guarantee you, we’ll get it done by the end of January,’” Menino told the Herald. “They’re going to get it done.”

Menino, who co-chairs Mayors Against Illegal guns with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, fiercely criticized National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre’s comments following the Dec. 14 Newtown school shooting that left 26 dead, including 20 children. . . .

Of course, Obama is also planning on moving forward with illegal immigration reforms this month.

The timeframe is likely to be cheered by Democrats and immigration reform advocates alike, who have privately expressed fears that Obama's second term will be drowned out in seemingly unending showdowns between parties. The just-completed fiscal cliff deal is giving way to a two-month deadline to resolve delayed sequestration cuts, an expiring continuing resolution to fund the government and a debt ceiling that will soon be hit. . . .

For five years Wikipedia had posting about nonexistent war

An article that is among the "top 10" Wikipedia hoaxes.

An article about an obscure 17th Century war in India has been deleted from Wikipedia — after an enterprising editor discovered that despite being on the site for 5 years, it had never actually occurred. Started in 2007, the Bicholim Conflict article described a "period of armed conflict between the Portuguese rulers of Goa and the Maratha Empire" that ended in a peace treaty, as well as its effect on later regional politics and popular culture. When Wikipedia user ShelfSkewed looked for the sources cited, however, he found that they either didn't exist or made no mention of the conflict. "An online search for 'Bicholim conflict' or for many of the article's purported sources," likewise, produced "only results that can be traced back to the article itself."The Bicholim Conflict isn't the longest-running Wikipedia hoax, as The Daily Dot notes, but it still makes the top ten list. . . .

A working group led by Vice President Biden is seriously considering measures backed by key law enforcement leaders that would require universal background checks for firearm buyers, track the movement and sale of weapons through a national database, strengthen mental health checks, and stiffen penalties for carrying guns near schools or giving them to minors, the sources said.

To sell such changes, the White House is developing strategies to work around the National Rifle Association that one source said could include rallying support from Wal-Mart and other gun retailers for measures that would benefit their businesses. White House aides have also been in regular contact with advisers to New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I), an outspoken gun-control advocate who could emerge as a powerful surrogate for the Obama administration’s agenda.

The Biden group, formed last month after the massacre at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school that killed 20 children and six adults, plans to submit a package of recommendations to President Obama this month. Once Obama’s proposals are set, he plans to lead a public-relations offensive to generate popular support. . . . .

Obama’s advisers have calculated that the longer they wait, the more distance there is from the Newtown massacre and the greater the risk that the bipartisan political will to tackle gun violence will dissipate.

“This is not something that I will be putting off,” Obama said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in an interview broadcast last Sunday. . . .